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Mar. 1st, 2026 07:24 amWhen I was in my early teens I was given paxil, the later-found-to-cause-suicide antidepressant, with no medical supervision. I wasn't told it could cause insomnia, so I spent the next quite awhile waking up at 1am and being fully unable to get back to sleep. Dad's office was over my bedroom and he was in there at night moving around and having lights on which bounced off the foliage and into my big glass sliding door, and I didn't (at first) have curtains, so I assumed it was him keeping me awake (which to be honest it might have done anyway, I'm very sensitive to light). I made some curtains out of sheets but still woke up, over and over, at 1am and could not get back to sleep.
It wasn't great for my relationship with my dad, since at sometime between 2 and 4 I tended to get hysterical and go up and ask him to be quieter and mom tried to mediate and dad super refused and I was (in hindsight) in full meltdown.
Since neither that nor the curtains helped, and this was pre-internet, I ended up reading a ton of books about sleep, how to manage the body into sleep, how to manage anxiety, etc. I spent many hours every night, from 1am to 6am, practicing various kinds of meditation, various breathing patterns, basically forcing myself into calmness.
The insomnia stopped when I stopped taking the pills, though I didn't connect the two until over a decade later when I learned about insomnia as a side effect -- as a throwaway line in an article about how it increased suicide rates in teens. If I'd still had a relationship with dad at that point, I would have apologized to him I guess. Or I would have, now.
But it means I have so many tools for insomnia. The first tool is not to panic. Treat it, as much as possible, as a welcome small personal safe space within the day that no one else can see (basically, like the split sleep idea). Don't force anything. Let actions come and go, ideally low energy bed ones. Read a little, pet a cat, and usually eventually tired will come into the body and it can be gently embraced then.
Meditation, breathing, etc make the whole thing a little bit more intense than it needs to be, but the meditative state of noticing thoughts and behaviours and not getting stuck to them, but observing and welcoming and letting them pass when they will is useful.
Getting those skills was so so so brutal. So many nights of full on mental storms for hours. I am however very glad to have them now. Chemical menopause hormones and PEM ("overdoing it") both mess up my sleep, and having things to reach for instead of that old panic is so much better than it was back then.
It wasn't great for my relationship with my dad, since at sometime between 2 and 4 I tended to get hysterical and go up and ask him to be quieter and mom tried to mediate and dad super refused and I was (in hindsight) in full meltdown.
Since neither that nor the curtains helped, and this was pre-internet, I ended up reading a ton of books about sleep, how to manage the body into sleep, how to manage anxiety, etc. I spent many hours every night, from 1am to 6am, practicing various kinds of meditation, various breathing patterns, basically forcing myself into calmness.
The insomnia stopped when I stopped taking the pills, though I didn't connect the two until over a decade later when I learned about insomnia as a side effect -- as a throwaway line in an article about how it increased suicide rates in teens. If I'd still had a relationship with dad at that point, I would have apologized to him I guess. Or I would have, now.
But it means I have so many tools for insomnia. The first tool is not to panic. Treat it, as much as possible, as a welcome small personal safe space within the day that no one else can see (basically, like the split sleep idea). Don't force anything. Let actions come and go, ideally low energy bed ones. Read a little, pet a cat, and usually eventually tired will come into the body and it can be gently embraced then.
Meditation, breathing, etc make the whole thing a little bit more intense than it needs to be, but the meditative state of noticing thoughts and behaviours and not getting stuck to them, but observing and welcoming and letting them pass when they will is useful.
Getting those skills was so so so brutal. So many nights of full on mental storms for hours. I am however very glad to have them now. Chemical menopause hormones and PEM ("overdoing it") both mess up my sleep, and having things to reach for instead of that old panic is so much better than it was back then.
